Glimpses of Australia’s redesigned single web portal for all government services have emerged online today.

The first draft of the site, or alpha, was posted by the Australian Ministry of Finance. “It’s just a few HTML pages that demonstrate the concept, but you’ll get an idea of where we’re heading,” wrote Sharyn Clarkson, Assistant Secretary in the Online Services Branch of the Ministry of Finance.

After user testing and research, the team has come up with four basic concepts to guide the project to its beta phase. First, the home page should offer a broad range of topics, but not overwhelm with mass hyperlinks; second, keywords under topic headings increase user confidence about which path to take; third, not everyone understands how government works so plain English is vital; and fourth, information placed on the right-hand side of a web page is often ignored.

The beta site will be available to the public to garner user feedback and enable more detailed research, Clarkson said. “We’ll be making the Beta site available on the internet, so that we can test ideas and enhancements in a live environment, with input from the public. It won’t be perfect, but the purpose of a Beta site is to uncover issues and make the necessary improvements.”

The site takes inspiration from the UK’s GOV.UK website, which combined all British central government websites into one portal. The design for this website was then re-used by the New Zealand government in an ongoing project to unify all of its websites.

Australia’s project will be launched on an open source CMS system, tieing in with its recent announcement that all government websites will be built on this CMS in future.